My Browser’s Best Productivity Hack Was Right Under My Nose

There are a variety of ways I’ve tried to improve my productivity in my browser, especially after abandoning Chrome. I tried read-later apps, a new approach to bookmarks, and some useful extensions.

But I recently discovered a tool that is not only built into browsers like Chrome and Brave, but is also simple enough to fit perfectly into my workflow. This feature is called custom search shortcuts and it’s been hiding under my nose for years.

While I knew that you could switch to custom search engines in most browsers, I didn’t realize that these included shortcuts that could be used to launch specific engines and websites from the address bar. This means that you can not only search specific sites through your address bar, but you can also assign short text commands to easily access these sites and other bookmarks.

For example, if you want to use one search engine for research and another for shopping, you don’t need to change your default browser or visit the search engine’s home page first. With shortcuts, you can activate the search engine from your address bar with a short text command. Additionally, you can use text commands to act as shortcuts to general websites with certain browsers.

You can set these shortcuts in Chromium browsers (including Chrome, Brave, and Edge) as well as Firefox. Depending on exactly which browser you use, different options will already be built in, but you can easily add additional ones.

In Chrome and Brave, you can access these shortcuts by going to Settings > Search Engine > Manage Search Engines and Site Search. You will find the shortcuts built into site search.

If you’re using Firefox, you’ll find these shortcuts in Settings > Search > Search shortcuts. However, Firefox custom shortcuts require a placeholder for the search query, which doesn’t make them useful as text shortcuts instead of bookmarks.

Those who prefer to use an AI search engine will appreciate that the browser has them added as custom options. There are also default shortcuts you can use to access your full bookmarks list and actions list.

For custom searches, in both Chromium and Firefox browsers, you will add a search URL and the “%s” placeholder. This placeholder tells the tool where to add your search query. The best way to get this URL, if it is not already available in the tool, is to go to the search engine or website search tool and use a test phrase and see how the URL is formatted with the query.

For example, if I search for “test” on Google, the resulting URL is: “https://www.google.com/search?q=test”. I can then replace the word “test” in the URL with “%s” and save it as a link in my shortcuts.

But since the custom search shortcut feature in Chrome and Brave is more flexible, I was also able to save shortcuts without any queries, which is why I found the feature so useful. For example, I created a shortcut to my Google Docs page using the “@docs” shortcut with the website address. Typing the text into my search bar and pressing Enter immediately took me to my documents page.

While I’m all for useful browser extensions, I’ve also tried to reduce their use to protect my privacy and data as much as possible. The fact that these shortcuts are built right into my browser makes them the perfect solution for me.

I have my most used sites saved as favorites in my favorites bar, as well as on my home page. But honestly, I use so many sites as a freelancer now that I often feel overwhelmed by them all, while also doing site-specific searches and switching between different workspaces.

However, the text shortcuts in my search bar have been a huge help. For example, I can use them to apply search filters automatically. When I write an article, I need to search for related articles on the specific site. When presenting new ideas, I need to make sure the site hasn’t already covered them.

The best way to do this is with a “site:” parameter in my search, which looks for results only from the specific site. This works better than the built-in search on most sites.

For years, I typed this parameter manually, followed by the site I want to search for, and then the term I want to search for. Now I can do this with a two letter shortcut. Not only does this make searching much faster, but it also means that when I mix up sites, the error takes less time.

Additionally, I have set up shortcuts to specific workspaces. Previously, I used bookmarks to visit sites like Slack and Asana. However, some bookmarks (like Asana) didn’t differentiate which site each link corresponded to, which meant I spent a lot of time switching between them.

I could have edited the titles to be more descriptive, but this would take up more space in my already crowded bookmarks bar. Meanwhile, if I typed the site into my address bar, the link gave me no idea what site it was to, a problem I had with Slack.

It turns out that a text shortcut has been a perfect solution for this. Now I have “@aaasana” and “@aaslack” set for the Android Authority instances of these applications, with different shortcuts to other sites. I’ve also set up shortcuts for other important pages that I visit frequently but don’t fit in my favorites bar. This saves me time spent searching through the suggested links that appear below my address bar.

This doesn’t mean you should only use shortcuts for work-related tasks. In fact, it has been very useful for online shopping. While I use Brave as my default search engine, it’s not great for browsing local sites. Local shopping is essentially the only reason I still use Google Search, even though the results are often flooded with sponsored articles.

There is a shortcut built into Brave for Google, but I modified it slightly to make it easier for me to remember. This made it easy for me to switch to a Google search when specifically looking for items available to purchase locally.

Then I added a few local shopping sites to my shortcuts, including Amazon’s local site and its main local competitor. I don’t shop online often, but a friend asked me to look at what he wanted for my birthday. This meant that I didn’t want to add the sites to my favorites, but I also didn’t want to constantly type in their addresses when I wanted to check if an item was available. Shortcuts turned out to be a happy medium.

There are plenty of other productivity apps and platforms to try, but what I like most about custom search shortcuts is that they’re simple enough to not overwhelm me while still offering a huge benefit to my workflow.

One drawback, however, is that the feature is not available in the Android app for Chrome or Brave. Fortunately, Firefox lets you save them as icons you can toggle between in your search bar, and Brave has an option to make it easier to quickly access a different search engine.